Ecco2k’s work until this point has been in the service of other people’s visions: The Swedish artist (aka Zak Arogundade) is creative director for his compatriot Yung Lean, editor of music videos for Yves Tumor, and an occasional runway model. He’s also a member of Drain Gang, the Yung Lean-adjacent collective that includes producer Whitearmor and vocalists Bladee and Thaiboy Digital. There’s been an air of mystery to Arogundade’s output as a multi-hyphenate creator; his career can be traced through guest features, behind-the-scenes credits, and cameos in the background of his friends’ videos.
Perhaps somewhat unusually for a hyper-prolific jack-of-all-trades with his fingers in multiple artistic economies, Ecco2k seems fine letting his collaborators take most of the credit, happy to offer his varied skill set as a helping hand to other artists. But wherever he turns up, it’s impossible to mistake Ecco2k’s voice for anyone else’s. That his fluttering, almost angelic falsetto has appeared only sporadically on other people’s records has made Drain Gang’s devoted fanbase—self-described “drainers”—even hungrier for his debut.
Beauty might be relegated to the background of Yung Lean’s music, in dialectic with the darkness of his lyrics and the occasional awkwardness of his delivery, but Ecco2k places aesthetic pleasure and warm feeling up front. More than anything else, the word to describe Ecco2k’s music is pretty, like a gentle tune from a music box. His light wail is often refracted through Auto-Tune but other times hangs plain and soft, devoid of digital manipulation.
Thaiboy Digital and Yung Lean’s take on rap is a looking-glass version of the American mainstream, but they can clearly be described as rappers. Ecco2k is different, and on E he jettisons most everything resembling hip-hop save for a loose, familiar framework of pounding 808s and occasional Soulja Boy references; this is the Stockholm rap scene’s most explicit stab at pop yet. Most tracks are still produced by Gud and Whitearmor, but Ecco2k strays from the Drain Gang house sound on “Fruit Bleed Juice” and “AAA Powerline,” both produced by genre-hopping compatriot Yves Tumor. On tracks like “Calcium,” Ecco2k alternates between very light rapping with a vaguely pop-punk vocal performance over beats that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Charli XCX project. These songs offer the vague outline of radio hits, filled in with an uncanny substance.
Tracks quickly rewind and fast-forward, sputter and start again, phrases repeated like fading memories turned over and over again in your mind. The opening track, “AAA Powerline,” is built largely around the repeated refrain “Zip-tied up/Can’t move my arms.” Ecco2k’s lyrics twinge with anguish and self-loathing. “Every time I look in the mirror I see monsters,” he laments on “Security!,” a song built on the desire to disguise a perceived ugliness inside: “How did you get so perfect?/I wish that I was perfect.”
As much as he might feel at odds with himself, the strongest track on E is a resolute commitment to self-expression. “Peroxide” plays up the contrast between Ecco2k’s ever-changing hair and the color of his skin: “No peroxide/I stay dark.” In a 2016 interview, a then-21-year-old Arogundade reflected on his experience growing up mixed—his mother is Swedish and his father is British and Nigerian—in a region known for racial homogeny: “I used to not want to be in the sun because I didn’t want to get sunburned; I didn’t want to get darker skin and just, like, really dumb stuff like that. But now it’s kind of the other way around, so I’m very much embracing being a black person.” That self-acceptance radiates from “Peroxide,” even if the world around Ecco2k still labels him an outsider: “They all stare at me/I don’t care at all.”
When Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective first emerged in 2012, the appeal of their music lay mostly in the dissonant juxtaposition of childish lyrics with achingly beautiful beats. As his work matured, Lean ditched the novelty of profane juvenilia, reaching for something more honest and introspective. Ecco2k has never really messed around with gimmickry or mimicry, shooting straight for the heart from the start. When he sings of breaking out of straitjackets, he’s referring as much to the confines of genre as the limits of his own identity. Ecco2k is committed to staying dark, but his music gleams bright in a region and rap scene known for its cloudiness. No longer just a below-the-line collaborator or background associate, on E he finally steps into the spotlight.
